Descendant of the Crane(100)

She turned to leave, but not before she heard a muffled sob. The sound wrung her heart. From whom had it come? A mother, mourning the loss of a child? A sister, mourning the death of her brother? There would be hatred in their eyes, if Hesina dared to look, and she dared, because she deserved it.

A hand grasped her elbow, stopping her.

Silently, Caiyan drew a cloak over her shoulders. He guided her down the pavilion before she could resist, standing behind her as if to shield her from all the hatred in the world. He helped her into the palanquin, and suddenly, Hesina found herself sitting knee to knee with a brother she hadn’t seen since that night in his room, hadn’t spoken to since that day in the throne hall.

She ought to say something now. She tried to work up the nerve for words.

Caiyan beat her to it. He reported on the progress of the examinations (they were past the preliminary rounds) and updated her on the movements of the city guards. Numbers and statistics passed his lips, his voice smooth and calm.

Hesina wanted to shake him. Stop pretending we’re fine. Tell me you hate me, blame me. Give me your hurt to work with, but don’t hide yourself like this.

But she was tired, and she was cold, and she was weary of battles she could not win. So she nodded along and listened and made all the right comments, and when they came to the palace, Caiyan bowed like a proper advisor and left Hesina standing before the throne hall doors.

Letters from Sanjing awaited on the ivory kang table inside. They’d been posted from Qiao, one of the three major merchant cities halfway to the front. Hesina carefully sliced them open. Her brother’s squared-off strokes were comforting, even though the words themselves—the Crown Prince has rallied a force of three thousand sooths, war is likely—were not.

She burned the letters once she finished reading and leaned her head onto her fingertips. Stability was only beginning to burgeon again; Kendi’a would kill it like a hard frost.

She spent the rest of the night drafting a missive to the kingdom of Ning. The Tenets forbade military alliances with any of the other three kingdoms, but she had chosen to stay. She had chosen to rule. Books and laws be damned—she had to do something.

She spent hours in the archives, seeking a way to destroy the book, skipping meals and forgoing sleep. A sooth had done the Reeling. Surely a sooth could reverse it. But considering her history with sooths—the two she knew were dead—Hesina wasn’t in a rush to befriend another.

Life went on as such for two weeks, until the evening Ming’er barred Hesina from the archives and insisted that she take a bath. Following a debate about hygiene, wars, and the pressing priority of both, Ming’er triumphed; a tub was filled with steaming vats of water carried in from the Imperial Laundry.

As Hesina soaked, her thoughts softened. Sleeping was also low on her list of priorities, but she couldn’t find a good reason not to close her eyes.

When she reopened them, seemingly seconds later, it was to the sight of her sister.

Hesina’s heart froze midbeat. “L-Lilian?”

Leaning her arms onto the rim of the tub, Lilian rested her chin atop her fists. “We could go anywhere, do anything.”

Hesina raised a dripping hand.

“We could ride serpents in the Baolin Isles, soak in the floating hot springs on the Aoshi archipelago.”

She reached for Lilian’s cheek.

“If I asked you to come, would you?”

Her hand went through air.

Hesina woke with a shudder, then shivered. The water had gone cold. She sat for a moment longer, staring at the empty space above the tub’s rim, then splashed out and grabbed the underrobes draped over the silk folding screen. Her sash crinkled as she tied it. She’d sewn Xia Zhong’s letters between the layers of fabric and hidden the original Tenets in plain sight on the shelves in her father’s study, the last place people would look.

She threw on a winter cloak and headed for the gardens, cutting a healthy branch from the peach grove before making for the persimmon. Under a moonlit sky veined with silver branches, Hesina set to work, clearing the snow, loosening the hard earth with a rock. She patted it all back in place around her inserted peach branch and studied her handiwork.

This was winter. Her first attempt was unlikely to succeed. But she would plant as many peach trees as it’d take for a lone one to stand among the persimmons. It wasn’t the same as a tombstone, but Lilian wouldn’t mind. In fact, thought Hesina with a watery smile, Lilian might have preferred it.

Then she rose and took in the surrounding gardens. She’d grown up here, seen ants swarm the peonies in the spring, tadpoles spawn in summer, gingko leaves ferment in autumn, camellias bloom in winter. She knew the paths and where they all led. That one went to the gazebo on the lotus pond. That, to the rock gardens.

And this, the one she ended up on, went to the place she’d sworn never to visit again.

Time had diluted her grief. Secrets had polluted it. Still, her pulse thrummed when she entered the iris beds. They were covered in snow, the flowers long dead. But they were preserved in her mind’s eye, just like her father, and Hesina knelt over the place she’d last found him, spreading her hands flat before her and pressing her forehead to their backs.

She stayed in the deepest koutou until her skin burned, itched, numbed. Until her form wilted and her shoulders hunched. She wished she could have said that she cursed this snowy spot, or wept solely for Lilian and Mei.